First the bad:
We've had a strange month with Billy. Near the beginning of this month, he started to refuse to use the toilet, and no longer notified us of his need to have a changed diaper. Back to square one on progress for that.

We received Billy's quarterly IEP progress report, and his self care (toileting and diaper awareness) progress were left blank. We thought that was odd too.

This week, we put Billy in an overnight pull-up on Sunday night. He was dry when he got up, so we sent him to school in it. He got home, and he was soaking wet in his diaper. It was the same pull-up he was in when we sent him, and it was soaking wet. Hmm. Odd.

The next day, we changed his diaper, and I wrote "8am" in sharpie on the inside of it near the top of his butt. When we picked him up, he had made a BM in the diaper, but it was the same "8am" diaper.

I shot a pretty dismayed email to the school social worker asking if changes had been made regarding staffing, because we had been noticing some disturbing patterns regarding diapers. 3 hours later, there was a freaked out voicemail from Billy's teacher (at 6:30pm, no less) apologizing profusely, stating they "had a lot of projects going on" and were profusely sorry for the lack of attention on the topic. Seriously? *sigh*. Well, they're on the topic more now. I don't want them to be nervous around my kid, but he needs individual attention on this stuff, and making sure he's cared for is (supposed to be) job #1 there.

Part of me suspects there was some sort of incident at school (maybe Billy fell off the potty seat there, or got pinched) and was difficult regarding diapers and toilet training after that. As he doesn't really communicate anything of non-immediate consequence, we'll probably never know.

Parent teacher conferences are coming up. I don't know if I'll be able to join them or not (Becky will attend either way), but we'll see.

Now the good:

Tonight though, I'll be happy. For the first time in several weeks, he asked to go potty. He was already partially done with a BM in his diaper, but he sat on the toilet for the longest period he has so far (roughly 3-4 minutes) and farted a lot. I was pretty happy with seeing him return to the toilet.

On the upside of school, Billy has been more communicative lately. He's using more canned phrases to communicate certain things. It does help quite a bit, and honestly, the phrases are a relatively good choice of wording most of the time. Some of it is even kind of cute and humorous. And we're hearing a lot more individual words to describe items – colors, easy nouns, etc. I'm pretty pleased with that development, as it's making life a little easier around here.

And Billy's actually reaching out to catch balls now rather than standing there and letting them hit him. He's generally unsuccessful at catching them, as he lacks coordination – but we're getting somewhere. And if you're a halfway decent thrower, you can stage some successful catches for him so he gets excited and encouraged.

Overall I think this school thing has been a win.

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